The present invention relates to the field of transceivers/receivers with remote controls, the controls being located preferably on a microphone chassis.
In prior transceivers having manually adjustable controls mounted on a remote microphone that was connected by a cable to the main transceiver chassis, generally separate conductors were required to carry the information produced by each adjustable microphone control. In addition, if an illuminated electronic channel indicating display was provided on the microphone, then additional separate conductors were required in the cable to provide for the excitation of this display. The result was that the cable connecting the microphone to the transceiver chassis required an extremely large number of individual conductor wires which increased the cost of the prior transceivers and resulted in having a stiff and combursome cable which would interface with the operation of the transceiver by an operator.
While multiplexing techniques have been applied to minimize the conductors between a remote microphone having manual controls and the transceiver chassis, typically these systems have been total digital systems which required the digitizing of all manual control adjustments. U.S. Pat. No. 4,147,984, is an example of such a system. By requiring the digitizing of all control information, the resolution of the control obtainable by these prior art systems had to be compromised with the complexity of the prior art systems. In addition, the cost of the prior art systems was increased due to the requirement for either an analog to digital convertor or a digitally stepped manual control, along with a digital to analog convertor if analog control signals were desired in the chassis.
While time shared multiplexing of analog signal amplitudes is known, as for example is discussed in the Society of Automotive Engineers' paper no. 760181 given at Detroit, Mich., U.S.A., in February, 1976, and entitled "Time-Shared Multiplexing System Applied to Motor Vehicles", typically analog multiplexing systems have not been utilized in conjunction with the multiplexing of digital information as represented by a multiple bit predetermined digital code representative of an information quantity which is to be transmitted from one location to another. In addition, the prior analog multiplexing systems have generally relied upon a rapid sequence of the multiplexing of analog information such that at the receiving end, the multiplexed analog signal is merely an effectively integrated composite signal. This meant that multiplexing rates for the prior analog systems had to be extremely rapid or else the effective integration of these prior systems would fail to produce a received composite analog signal sufficiently directly related to the transmitted analog amplitude.